Ibn Rušd al-Ǧadd (1058–1126): Fatwās about Marriage and Married Life

This paper tries to shed light on marital relations in Mediaeval Andalusia, and at the same time on marital relations in the Mediaeval Arab world in general. Much is known about the jurisdiction of Islamic law on marriage and the prescriptions of the married life, but we cannot get an insight into the courts’ judgements on the same field – as a matter of fact, on no fields. The nearest possible way to comprehend how the judicial system works in solving the different problems which arise during family life, seems to be given by the answers to legal questions, the fatwās of the muftīs.
The first fatwā collection in the territories of al-Maġrib and al-Andalus was that of Ibn Rušd al-Ǧadd at the turn of the 11th and 12th centuries, in the Almoravid era. Abū l-Walīd Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad ibn Aḥmad Ibn Rušd al-Ǧadd (December 1058 – 8 December 1126), known as Ibn Rušd al-Ǧadd, was the grandfather of the famous philosopher Ibn Rušd al-Ḥafīd (Averroes), one of the most famous mālikī jurists of his age.
The work, which bears the title Fatāwā Ibn Rušd, contains 666 fatwās collected by the editor from different manuscript sources. From these, the paper analysis twenty-five,  which deal exclusively with the questions of marriage: marriage in general, guardianship, dower problems, marriage contract, the support of the wife, divorce and remarriage, the drunkenness of the husband, and cases of invalid marriages.